You may have heard us say before that to attract traffic, engage readers, and convert them to buyers, you need to become an authority in your topic.
But what does that really mean?
Does it mean you puff yourself up and pretend to know more than you do?
Does it mean you put other people in your niche down?
Or does it mean you bore your audience to tears with dry, flavorless facts?
Of course not.
For awhile, the conventional wisdom was that people (particularly young people) don’t care about authority any more.
The theory was that we were so burned out by scandals from traditional authority, and that these days we were only listening to what our friends recommended. We didn’t care about experts, we didn’t recognize authority, and we only trusted people we knew.
This was obvious nonsense to anyone who has ever studied the science of human behavior. We’re hard-wired to respect authority, no matter how much we might fight it at times. It’s part of our DNA, and nothing the 21st century throws at us is going to change that.
But who are we hard-wired to respect? An anonymous actor in a white coat who plays a doctor on TV? A charismatic televangelist we’ve never met?
Becoming the expert they respect and like
Of course not. We’re hard-wired to respect and take direction from people we know, like, and trust who know more than we do about something we care about.
It may be the tribal shaman, or the wise woman who knows all about healing herbs, or the group’s most skillful hunter.
It’s not a stranger, and the authority comes from both the relationship with the tribe and being able to benefit that tribe in a meaningful way.
(Try bluffing your ice age buddies by puffing yourself up with false authority. You’d end up shipped out of town on the next ice...
